A tearful phone call from a man accused of providing an unregistered gun used in a shootout with Hackensack police.

These are a few of the scenes captured in a six-part documentary on life inside the Bergen County Jail that began airing Saturday night on the MSNBC program “Lockup.”

The series – which features footage filmed in jails across the country – gives an unvarnished look at several real-life dramas large and small under the title “Hackensack – Extended Stay.”

Jail officials gave the film crew access to inmate areas within the jail on River Street in Hackensack for a total of about seven weeks from mid-June to mid-October.

Some of the inmates featured in the program are obscure small-time criminals, like a self-described gang “minister of defense,” whom another gang member claims he’s never heard of.

Or a woman accused of fraudulently obtaining pain-killing drugs whose story of losing part of her hair in a salon “mishap” meets with a skeptical reaction from her jailers.

Others are figures in higher profile cases, Robert Leonardis, who tells the film crew that he was feeling suicidal before he was shot 14 times in a shootout with the Hackensack Police.

And then there’s David Goodell, a halfway house “walkaway” who was sentenced to 45 years in September for strangling his girlfriend Viviana Tulli, a case that has placed New Jersey’s privately run halfway houses under intense scrutiny.

Stella Tulli, Viviana’s older sister, said she agreed to be interviewed for the program after a producer reached out to her. The four-hour interview in July brought back a lot of painful memories, Tulli said Sunday. But she felt it was important to keep public attention on what happened to her sister.

“Watching him say how he killed her, it ignited an even bigger fire in me,” Tulli said of Goodell. “It’s very, very personal. This is as personal as you can get.”

Tulli has sued the company that runs the halfway house that Goodell escaped from and has been an outspoken advocate for legislative reform of New Jersey’s halfway house system.

As part of the program, she provided video footage from her cellphone of her driving to visit her sister’s gravesite at St. Mary’s Cemetery in Saddle Brook.

Susan Carney, the senior field producer for the Bergen County segments, said she tries to reach out to victims of the crimes featured in the program. Carney said she always offered them the opportunity to present their point of view.

Carney has been working “Lockup” since 2005 for 44 Blue Productions, the Studio City, Calif., company that produced the program for MSNBC.

She said Bergen County officials were receptive when they were approached about doing the program. She said it helped that the jail had some “charismatic” people on staff who also figure in the broadcast.

Carney said she was struck by how the jail – with about 900 inmates – did not have the overcrowding that she has seen at some other jails where they have filmed. She credited some of that to drug court and an in-house drug treatment program that is featured in one of the episodes.

Her crew captured some conflict between inmates, notably a fight between two female inmates that resulted in both being disciplined.

Carney, who describes her work as “non-fiction” as opposed to “reality” television, said she does not believe the presence of her film crew encouraged the fight.

She said there were other fights she heard about when the crew was not present. And after filming six days a week for more than 12 hours a day, she said the inmates cease to notice the cameras.